Violence and Dystopia

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Violence and Dystopia: Mimesis and Sacrifice in Contemporary Western Dystopian Narratives By Daniel Cojocaru Cambridge Scholars Publishing TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Chapter One 1 Introduction 1.1 Modern Dystopia 1 1.2 Rene Girard's Mimetic Theory 10 1.2.1 Imitative Desire 10 1.2.2 Violence and the Sacred 16 1.2.3 Girard and the Bible 20 1.2.4 Criticism of the Girardian Paradigm 29 1.3 Violence and Dystopia..... 35 Chapter Two 40 Scarifices 2.1 J.G. Ballard's Crash - Revolutionary Millenarianism by Car 40 2.1.1 TV-violence and Car Culture as Mediators of Reality 42 2.1.2 The Crash: Breaking Through the Isolation of the Car 46 2.1.3 The Wounds Do Not Heal: Holes in the Baudrillardian Simulation 48 2.1.4 The Scarifice - Sacrifice by Car 52 2.2 Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Rant, and Brad Anderson's The Machinist 68 2.2.1 Palincest in Fight Club 68 2.2.2 Rant 82 2.2.3 The Machinist 93 Chapter Three 98 Atro city 3.1. Iain Sinclair 99 3.1.1 Structuring the Unstructurable 99 3.1.2 Downriver I 107 3.1.3 Rodinsky's Room 115 3.1.4 Downriver II 124 3.1.5 Sinclair's Aura 139 3.1.6 Scapegoating The Widow 141 viii Violence and Dystopia 3.2. Peter Ackroyd 144 3.2.1 Hawksmoor 148 3.2.2 Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem 15 1 3.2.3 London: The Biography 154 Chapter Four 159 Crowds 4.1 J. G. Ballard 160 4.1.1 High-Rise 160 4.1.2 Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come 167 4.2 Stewart Home 184 4.2.1 Come Before Christ and Murder Love 191 4.2.2 Defiant Pose, Red Londen and Blow Job 196 4.3 David Peace 207 4.3.1 The Red Riding Quartet 207 4.3.2 The Miners' Strike of 1984/85 214 4.3.3 Battling to the End 217 4.3.4 GB84 220 4.3.5 A Note on Hope in the Red Riding Quartet 233 Chapter Five 238 Violentropy 5.1 Radon Daughters 238 5.2 Margaret Atwood 252 5.2.1 The Handmaid's Tale 252 5.2.2 Oryx and Crake 264 5.3 Will Self 281 5.3.1 Girardian Themes in Will Self's Fiction 281 5.3.2 The Book of Dave 295 Chapter Six 305 Conclusion Bibliography 309 Index 327 .

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Near Vermilion Sands: the Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard
Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard Chris Beckett ‘We had entered an inflamed landscape’1 When Raine Channing – ‘sometime international model and epitome of eternal youthfulness’2 – wanders into ‘Topless in Gaza’, a bio-fabric boutique in Vermilion Sands, and remarks that ‘Nothing in Vermilion Sands ever changes’, she is uttering a general truth about the fantastic dystopian world that J. G. Ballard draws and re-draws in his collection of stories set in and around the tired, flamboyant desert resort, a resort where traumas flower and sonic sculptures run to seed.3 ‘It’s a good place to come back to,’4 she casually continues. But, like many of the female protagonists in these stories – each a femme fatale – she is a captive of her past: ‘She had come back to Lagoon West to make a beginning, and instead found that events repeated themselves.’5 Raine has murdered her ‘confidant and impresario, the brilliant couturier and designer of the first bio-fabric fashions, Gavin Kaiser’.6 Kaiser has been killed – with grim, pantomime karma – by a constricting gold lamé shirt of his own design: ‘Justice in a way, the tailor killed by his own cloth.’7 But Kaiser’s death has not resolved her trauma. Raine is a victim herself, a victim of serial plastic surgery, caught as a teenager in Kaiser’s doomed search for perpetual gamin youth: ‘he kept me at fifteen,’ she says, ‘but not because of the fashion-modelling. He wanted me for ever when I first loved him.’8 She hopes to find in Vermilion Sands, in its localized curvature of time and space, the parts of herself she has lost on a succession of operating tables.
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Keyes: J.G. Ballard’s Reappraisal of Space 48 From a ‘metallized Elysium’ to the ‘wave of the future’: J.G. Ballard’s Reappraisal of Space Jarrad Keyes Independent Scholar _____________________________________ Abstract: This essay argues that the ‘concrete and steel’ trilogy marks a pivotal moment in Ballard’s intellectual development. From an earlier interest in cities, typically London, Crash ([1973] 1995b), Concrete Island (1974] 1995a) and High-Rise ([1975] 2005) represent a threshold in Ballard’s spatial representations, outlining a critique of London while pointing the way to a suburban reorientation characteristic of his later works. While this process becomes fully realised in later representations of Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company ([1979] 1981) and the concept of the ‘virtual city’ (Ballard 2001a), the trilogy makes a number of important preliminary observations. Crash illustrates the roles automobility and containerisation play in spatial change. Meanwhile, the topography of Concrete Island delineates a sense of economic and spatial transformation, illustrating the obsolescence of the age of mechanical reproduction and the urban form of the metropolis. Thereafter, the development project in High-Rise is linked to deindustrialisation and gentrification, while its neurological metaphors are key markers of spatial transformation. The essay concludes by considering how Concrete Island represents a pivotal text, as its location demonstrates. Built in the 1960s, the Westway links the suburban location of Crash to the West with the Central London setting of High-Rise. In other words, Concrete Island moves athwart the new economy associated with Central London and the suburban setting of Shepperton, the ‘wave of the future’ as envisaged in Ballard’s works.
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Contents PROOF
PROOF Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1 Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer Part I ‘Fictions of Every Kind’: Form and Narrative 1 Ballard’s Story of O: ‘The Voices of Time’ and the Quest for (Non)Identity 19 Rowland Wymer 2 Ballard/Atrocity/Conner/Exhibition/Assemblage 35 Roger Luckhurst 3 Uncanny Forms: Reading Ballard’s ‘Non-Fiction’ 50 Jeannette Baxter Part II ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: Sex, Geometry and the Body 4 Pornographic Geometries: The Spectacle as Pathology and as Therapy in The Atrocity Exhibition 71 Jen Hui Bon Hoa 5 Disaffection and Abjection in J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash 88 Emma Whiting 6 Reading Posture and Gesture in Ballard’s Novels 105 Dan O’Hara Part III ‘Babylon Revisited’: Ballard’s Londons 7 The Texture of Modernity in J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise 123 Sebastian Groes v September 30, 2011 17:22 MAC/BAXI Page-v 9780230_278127_01_prex PROOF vi Contents 8 J. G. Ballard and William Blake: Historicizing the Reprobate Imagination 142 Alistair Cormack 9 Late Ballard 160 David James Part IV ‘The Personal is Political’: Psychology and Sociopathology 10 Empires of the Mind: Autobiography and Anti-imperialism in the Work of J. G. Ballard 179 David Ian Paddy 11 ‘Going mad is their only way of staying sane’: Norbert Elias and the Civilized Violence of J. G. Ballard 198 J. Carter Wood 12 The Madness of Crowds: Ballard’s Experimental Communities 215 Jake Huntley 13 ‘Zones of Transition’: Micronationalism in the Work of J. G.
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PULSE: the Journal of Science and Culture — Volume 7 (2020) Christopher Webb1 A ‘CLOCK LESS URGENT’ Work, Leisure and Time in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and Vermilion Sands Abstract This article proposes that the deliberate com- post-industrial future and the resulting “sud- plication of time in J. G. Ballard’s early fiction— den onrush of leisure,” Ballard’s fictions go be- specificallyVermilion Sands and The Drowned yond a simple critique of what an all-permis- World—responds to a certain shift in mid- sive leisure society might look like. Instead, twentieth-century evaluations of work and they prod and unsettle the notion of linear leisure. It suggests that the characters who time and, by doing so, force us to confront the populate Ballard’s early fictions can be read essential weirdness behind what we consider as displaced and disorientated late-capitalist to be the ‘normal’ experience of time. subjects, whose experience of time is trans- formed by the ‘weird’ temporality of the land- scapes in which they find themselves. Written Key words: J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World, at a time when many were concerned about a Vermilion Sands, work, leisure, time 1 A ‘CLOCK LESS URGENT’ by Christopher Webb INTRODUCTION All my own fiction could be regarded as an attempt to escape from time—or, more exactly, from linear time, as it seems to me . the most significant relationships and experiences of our lives are intelligible only in non-linear terms. — J. G. Ballard2 During the mid-twentieth century, across the U.S. and western Europe, there were a number of critical attempts to re-examine the traditional ideas, assump- tions, and attitudes associated with work and leisure.
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